Eight teams emerge from 3 Day Startup Iowa City

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While most of their peers were preparing for finals or enjoying the spring weather, about 35 Iowan students spent the weekend building startups.

3 Day Startup (3DS) was started at the University of Texas at Austin, and has expanded to more than 55 universities worldwide.

"The mantra is, 'make something people want,'" said Maia Donohue, a program manager at 3DS, on the emphasis on customer discovery. "There's a lot of pivoting, and a lot of learning that comes through that process."

The event is similar in format to Startup Weekend. Ideas are pitched on Friday night and teams form around the most popular. Customer discovery, business planning and development work happen all weekend before a final pitch Sunday night.

That said, there are a few key differences between 3DS and Startup Weekend:

3DS is only open to students, who must apply to participate, where Startup Weekend is open to anyone

Startup Weekend only allows new ideas, where some 3DS projects had already been in the works for months.

Startup Weekend declares winners, where 3DS typically does not.

Alexander noted that many JPEC events, including the numerous business model and pitch competitions that happen each year, are geared toward students who have already launched a business. 3DS gives students from different majors a chance to connect and explore the very beginnings of an idea.

"We really tried to get out and spread the word to engineering, computer science and graphic design," she said.

Seven teams made it through the weekend: Alphabetically:

Blue Cheese

Pitched by: Ruihao Min

Blue Cheese is an app that translates menu items between Chinese and English. Min, who came to the U.S. from China four years ago as an international student, said this helps to overcome a significant cultural barrier, not just a language barrier. A simple dictionary translator could tell the meaning of "blue" and "cheese" without correctly identifying "blue cheese."

Blue Cheese has a team of six that have been developing the app for iOS and Android for a few months, and the business has received funding from a few JPEC business model and plan competitions. Although a prototype of the app has already been developed, Min said participating in 3DS was a chance to connect with mentors and re-evaluate their business model.

"We wanted to forget everything we had and start over again," he said.

As an undergraduate, Min founded Ai Cheng CHECK, a magazine for international students, and turned it into a student organization with 35 staff members.

Boomer Network

Pitched by: Arabella Franze-Soeln

This three-sibling team hopes to help the baby boomer generation stay connected to family members who may live all over the world.

The siblings came up with the idea when they moved to Iowa and struggled to stay in touch with their grandparents in Europe. The grandmother would write a lengthy e-mail message, which the siblings would not want to spend time replying to in equal length. Meanwhile, they were sharing photos daily on social media, but the grandparents were disconnected because they saw Facebook and Instagram as too complex.

"Our generation, we feel really guilty for not communicating with them more," Arabella Franze-Soeln said.

Boomer Network would automatically send all photos and updates with a specific hashtag - say, #boomer - to a list of family email addresses.

Arabella Franze-Soeln also participated in Startup Weekend Cedar Rapids. Sister Magdalena Franze-Soeln said the three-day format forced them to focus on what was truly essential for their first version of their product. For example, they decided to create a single family login with a simple email list, rather than individual user profiles.

CareerKarma

Pitched by: Julian Valencia

CareerKarma hopes to connect students with alumni for valuable mentoring and career advancement opportunities. Valencia said that career services departments and alumni associations currently use old-school tools like spreadsheets to store alumni names and contact information, and end up acting as gatekeepers.

CareerKarma would allow the alums to opt in to the service and specify how they want to engage with students. Students would be able to work with one alum at a time. A "karma tracker" would gamify the alum's mentorship contributions.

The original idea was to charge students for the service, but Valencia said the team pivoted to a subscription model for career services centers after speaking with students about their preferences.

Valencia began work on the idea during a session of JPEC's Venture School, an intensive business validation course.

Catheter

Pitched by: Ahmed Selim

Currently, less than 20 percent of patients who go into cardiac arrest in a hospital survive. For those who have an arrest outside the hospital, the rates are even lower.

A medical device pitched by a UIHC physician student hopes to change that. A small catheter placed inside the heart would buy extra time while doctors or emergency crew work to restore heart function.

An application for a provisional patent has been submitted, and a prototype is being built.

PartnerUp

Pitched by: Ben Gordon

PartnerUp hopes to be a sort of matchmaking service for entrepreneurs. Someone with a business idea could find co-founders with development or design skills, or someone with in-demand skills but no idea could find a new project to work on.

Appropriately enough, the two-man team of Gordon Tim Zhang didn't know each other before the weekend.

After finding similar products while conducting market research, the PartnerUp team is focusing on connecting student entrepreneurs, who have a unique set of time constraints.

The business model is also different from the competition: while most matchmaking sites or recruiters would charge a flat fee, PartnerUp will make the match in exchange for a small amount of equity. The co-founders would then stay involved as consultants to the businesses that started with PartnerUp.

Slingshot

Pitched by: Patrick Dennis

Slingshot hopes to provide local TV stations with easy and affordable market research through a survey program.

Users would take a five-question survey on the Slingshot app, in return for a reward from the TV station or one of the station's business partners (for example, a bar could offer free drinks). With an annual subscription, the TV station would see answers to their own questions (such as 'who's your favorite anchor?' or 'how many hours of TV do you watch per week?') as well as aggregate data from around the nation.

"It's affordable market research for people who want access to big data," Dennis said.

The team is starting with TV because stations already pay for market research, Dennis said, but he hopes the model could work for radio, casinos, bars, and any type of business that wants to better understand their customers.

Dennis was one of a few Iowa State University students who made the drive to participate in 3DS Iowa City.

SocialPulse

Pitched by: John Sevier

SocialPulse would be a social media aggregation tool, pulling reviews, mentions and photos from multiple platforms to rate which local businesses are trending or "hot."

This would allow users to see what's popular in their cities, in one place, in real time. The company also hopes to offer analytics to the businesses to improve their social media standings, as well as guidance to encourage their users to post reviews.

"As a local small business owner, I can't find out how my social media translated into people in my store and dollars in my pocket," Sevier said. "I thought, why would you pay Facebook directly when you could get your customers to advertise for you."

Speech Boss

Pitched by: Nico Aguilar

Speech Boss is an app that would use voice recognition technology to help a person improve their public speaking skills. The app would track a speaker's number of filler words such as "like" and "um," as well as the number of words spoken per minute and volume level.

Public speaking used to intimidate him, Aguilar said, until a high school teacher encouraged him to record his presentations and listen to them with a critical ear. By tracking his bad habits, Aguilar was able to improve them. Speech Boss hopes to automate that process. Like wearable fitness trackers that give users real-time data on their activity, Speech Boss plays into the idea of a quantified self.

Aguilar pitched Speech Boss under a different name at 1 Million Cups' half-baked idea day, and after hearing positive feedback decided to pitch it for 3DS.

"Speaking can make or break a career - and it's not something people should be afraid of," he said.

Aguilar also participated in Startup Weekend Cedar Rapids - read more about his other businesses here.